Redeemers (63 page)

For Chávez, another factor, his identity as a soldier, is almost as important as his faith in the role of the
caudillo
and his revolutionary convictions. “Our movement was born in the barracks. That's a factor we can never forget, it was born there and its roots are there.” From the beginning it was clear that he loved military parades, and that he saw the country and the society from the idealized point of view of an orderly and hierarchical military structure. On the subject of liberal democracy, his opinions have always been emphatic: “Liberal democracy does not work, its time has passed, new models must be invented, new formulas . . . Democracy is like a rotten mango: it has to be taken as seed and then sown.” Speaking about the opposition parties represented in parliament, Chávez went so far as to exclaim, at a rally before he was first elected, that “we, you and I, are going to roll the [social democratic opposition] up in a giant ball of . . . I can't say what because it's rude.” And the crowd responded: “Of shit!” Years later he would declare that “the opposition will never return to power, by fair means or foul.” On the question of his tenure in office, if not eternal or for life, still conceived as very long indeed, he suggested, when he visited Cuba in 1999, that his presidency would last “twenty to forty years.”

On a continent where European ideas from the right and from the left have sometimes been fused into bizarre mixtures, one influence on the development of Chávez's authoritarian ideas is likely to have been a man he once described as his “great friend,” the Argentine sociologist Norberto Ceresole. One month after his first election, Chávez would expel him from the country because Ceresole's paranoid, neo-Nazi anti-Semitism had become an embarrassment to many Chavistas, in a country where a Jewish community had long lived in peace and prosperity. Chávez had met Ceresole shortly after being released from prison in 1994. He had spent two years behind bars for leading, as a paratrooper colonel, an abortive coup attempt against the democratically elected government of Carlos Andrés Pérez, under whom the Caracazo had exploded in 1989. (Pérez would be impeached in 1993.) The coup had little support in the Venezuelan military and never got off the ground. But it was the beginning of Chávez's status as a “hero” for many Venezuelans who saw him as their would-be champion against corruption. When he was allowed to appear on television, after his surrender, so that he might instruct all his supporters to lay down their arms, he threw in a remark that the movement had failed “
por ahora
(for now).”

Hugo Chávez was impressed with Ceresole's energy and apparent learning. And the meeting came at a delicate moment in Chávez's life, when the future seemed uncertain and he was ripe for the influence of a powerful personality. Ceresole's adventurous résumé involved oscillations through time and space and formal ideologies. He was essentially an authoritarian leftist, with an abstract Argentine-style hatred for the United States, a loyalty to Peronism, and a strong dose of neo-Nazi ideology thrown into the rest of the mix and eventually dominating his ideas. He had been a left-wing Peronista Montonero guerrilla, an advisor to the extreme right-wing Carapintadas (who had hoped to overthrow one of the democratic regimes that had succeeded the Argentine military terror of 1976–83), a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and a professor at the Soviet Military Academy, then a representative in Madrid of the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah, and so on. By the time he arrived in Venezuela explicitly to seek out Chávez, as a rising military star, and to become for a time his advisor, he had settled into obsessive raging at the politics of Israel and, far worse, neo-Nazi Holocaust denial (though he always rejected the label), spinning his paranoia into the myth of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy out to dominate Latin America. One of his major influences on the future comandante would be his focus on the necessary union of Latin American countries to oppose the United States of America, Bolivarian in form but—unlike Bolívar's entirely practical dream—intensely ideological. He also may have strengthened the future comandante's military inclination toward the central importance of the
caudillo
. In
The Caudillo, the Army and the People: The Venezuela of Comandante Chávez
(1999), the last book he would produce before his expulsion from Venezuela, Ceresole wrote:

 

In Venezuela, the change will be channeled through one man, one “physical person,” not an abstract idea or a party . . . the people of Venezuela created a caudillo. The nucleus of power today lies precisely in the relationship established between the leader and the masses. The unique and differential nature of the Venezuelan process cannot be distorted or misinterpreted. What we have here is a people issuing an order to a chief, a caudillo, a military leader.

 

The question of anti-Semitism (and accusations of it) really entered into Chavismo as an offshoot (albeit a disturbing one, with frequent anti-Jewish or anti-Israel remarks made on official TV by his spokesmen) of the Comandante's foreign policy and his strong views on foreign affairs, which may have been partially influenced by the lingering shadow of Ceresole.

 

CHÁVEZ HAS
persecuted select and sometimes collective enemies but his actions have not been brutal. Verbally, though, he certainly has been brutal and abusive beyond all limits. Those who are not with him are “against Venezuela,” are “imperialists,” “pitiyanquis
”
(little Yankees), “filth.” A climate of psychic hatred has been encouraged, working to further divide a nation that was not historically divided. And the mismanagement of the economy is not only due to the evident problems of corruption, the placement of often incompetent Chavista loyalists, and the diversion of resources toward the imperatives of Chávez's foreign policies, but also to his insistent demonization of the market economy, oriented toward the creation of “21st-century socialism” obviously based on Cuban policies about which Fidel Castro himself now expresses his doubts. They also stem from Chávez's impulsiveness and his impatience. One prominent feature has been his urge to “bypass” the formal institutions of government and “go directly to the people.” The result has often been—as with PDVSA and the Missions—the ruination of irreplaceable institutions.

With his victory in the second referendum—and his growing control over the electoral apparatus and the Congress, fiscal, judiciary, and electoral branches of the state—Chávez may be able to win the series of reelections he considers essential to his project. But there are a number of barriers that may derail the runaway train of the Bolivarian Revolution. Most important perhaps is the continued existence of an active and vibrant civil society in Venezuela. Six million people voted for the Chávez proposal to abolish term limits, but five million abstained, and another five million voted against him. The present opposition is based on a democratic value structure that was several generations in the making and still retains institutional and legal weight. It is a dissident mass and is made up of elements from a wide social spectrum: workers, housewives, union leaders, small and medium-size business owners, intellectuals, academics, artists, writers, priests, journalists, and by now a significant segment of the poor.

Anti-Chavista students in particular have been at the forefront of this public and nonviolent resistance. The great majority of students are opposed to Chávez, as evidenced by the multitudinous marches that have taken place in Venezuela since 2007 and by the fact that most of the elected leaders of student government organizations are partisans of the opposition. These students are in favor of a shift of resources and the strengthening of programs and institutions to help the poor. They oppose Chávez for a number of reasons, but what most angers them is Chávez's cult of personality and one-man rule. They want their political freedom to choose and the idea that a
caudillo
may govern their children and grandchildren is totally unacceptable.

 

AND FINALLY
, it should be added that if Bolívar was the hero, for him, of the nineteenth century and Castro of the twentieth, Chávez will surely seek the same glory in the twenty-first. And he may let tensions build to the breaking point. He very well might, as some socialists used to say, sharpen the contradictions. And then Venezuela, as has happened too often in its past history, could be plunged into a new world not of redemption but of blood.

Epilogue

In 1984 I had a conversation on Mexican television with Octavio Paz, who had just turned seventy. Although we spoke about many things, I was especially interested in the tension (and, in a way, the contradiction) that I perceived between his relatively late commitment to political liberalism and his ongoing admiration for the three ancient traditions of Mexico: the Spanish, the Catholic, and the Indian. In his
The Labyrinth of Solitude
, he had characterized the nineteenth century as the time of an unfortunate rupture with these traditions. In Mexico (and throughout Latin America) the nineteenth had been the century of classic liberalism and, for Paz, an age of loss, preceded by the “communion” (
comunión
—an important word in Paz's poetic vocabulary) of the Colony (the three centuries of New Spain), when, Paz asserted, “all men and all races had found a place, a justification and a meaning.”

Twenty-five years later, he still had his doubts about the liberal tradition into which he had been born. He had just published his great book on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and her entrapment within the pressures of Catholic orthodoxy. He could not ignore the darker aspects of the long colonial period—its despotism, its corporate and hierarchical structure, the absence of freedom and criticism, the power of the Holy Inquisition—but he still felt a nostalgia (which he considered characteristic of his generation) for the “living, social and spiritual order” of Catholic and monarchical New Spain. He was fully aware of the social progress that nineteenth-century liberalism had brought to Mexico, separating church and state, abolishing many unjust privileges, establishing the legal equality of all Mexicans. But liberalism, by itself, could not lead to “the birth of a new order.” It was for him a “superficial revolution” spurred by intellectuals and a minority of the middle class. It could not be compared to the “much deeper revolution” that resulted from the introduction of Christianity. It had not penetrated to the depths of Mexican life (
al país profundo
). It had not created a new “order . . . a harmony between beliefs, ideas and actions.”

For decades, Paz had believed that the Mexican Revolution and, most especially, an expected socialist revolution could reestablish an organic and humanly beneficial state of “order.” Nor was he alone in his hopes. Various generations of thinkers, teachers, students, and Latin American guerrilla fighters had shared this conviction, and they thought of themselves not as mere reformers but more truly as redeemers.

The twentieth-century criticism of nineteenth-century liberalism spread through Europe after World War I, not only in leftist voices but from thinkers as diverse as T. S. Eliot, Oswald Spengler, and Sigmund Freud. It would reach Latin America in the 1920s, merged with the prestige of the Soviet Union and the aura of Marxism, which had inspired the imagination and expectations of much of the world, like a new religion. In Latin America it encountered especially fertile ground, due to ancestral social problems like poverty, inequality, and racism as well as grievances arising from the crisis of 1898 and the long sequence of conflicts (cultural, political, economic, and military) between the two Americas—in José Enrique Rodó's terms, Ariel and Caliban. But the attraction, across the twentieth century, of redemptive ideology and growing anti-Americanism cannot be explained solely by a “nostalgia for order” that has lingered (though with diminished force) right up to our own time. It is also in part due to the survival of that antique order itself, the mental imprint upon us of the “two Majesties,” the Monarchy and the Church, the sword and the cross.

The influence of the monarchy survived in our countries, in a reduced but evident form, a half-buried state of mind, a political culture endowed with the terminology of “State,” “people,” “popular sovereignty,” and “Revolution,” though with a significance quite different, often directly opposed, to the Anglo-Saxon usages of these terms. The American historian Richard Morse (1922–2001) deeply explored this context of contradictions, especially in his important and influential book
El Espejo de Próspero
(Prospero's Mirror), in 1982, which has never been published in English. He pointed to the essential conflict between Latin American and Anglo-Saxon political philosophies. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, English and American thinkers for the most part had based their ideas on John Locke and (to a lesser degree) Thomas Hobbes. They argued for the force of human reason, for the individual conscience as the source of political power, for civic tolerance and a social contract that could limit naturally occurring violence and organize a life in common for society. Some Latin American theorists had adopted these imported ideas, but far more central and pervasive was the tradition stemming from the Catholic neo-scholastics, like the Jesuit Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), who had renovated the current of analysis emanating from St. Thomas Aquinas.

In contrast to the Hobbesian assumption of a state (if unregulated) of individual egos in automatic conflict, Suárez sees “an ordered whole in which the will of the collectivity and that of the prince are in harmony, illuminated by natural law and in the interest of civil felicity and the common good.” The state is seen as paternal, protective, and corporative, an “organic architecture,” a “mystical body.” It is a father, dominating its subjects for their own good and kept in order not by the dictates of free individuals but by objective, external precepts of natural law. And the most important point is that “the people” are the original reservoir of sovereignty (delegated to them by God) but, as the consequence of a primal political pact, they in turn not only have delegated this sovereignty but have transferred it entirely to the prince or monarch, who then (in a process similar to the transubstantiation accomplished by the Mass) becomes the coordinating center of society.

This alienation of power from the people to the monarch is total and extremely difficult to revoke. The monarch can act according to his “royal will” and the people must accept it, provided that the monarch does not violate the original conditions of the pact and keeps to the recognized norms of justice. And this proviso leaves a tiny opening through which the pact may be terminated. If the people judge the prince to be a “tyrant,” the option exists (in a society where public criticism could not occur and a popular vote was inconceivable) of deposition, insurrection, and, in the most extreme need, the killing of the tyrant: “tyrannicide,” an extreme and very unlikely action, never implemented in the monarchical history of Spain (though it occurred in France and England).

But two and a half centuries before Rousseau, Suárez had elaborated a theory similar to the Swiss Frenchman's notion of the “general will,” which decisively influenced the outbreak and development of the French Revolution. The Jesuit specifies that a ruler can only be executed if his acts of tyranny and injustice are “public and manifest.” Action would be taken by a collective “we,” not at all resembling the free and democratic decisions of a collection of individuals but rather a kind of “all” that was indivisible and not subject to appeal, the Voice of God, the Will of the Nation united and expressed in the public square. And this concept has been passed down through the centuries most clearly by the great Spanish playwrights of the Golden Age. Only in the Spanish language does a great literature exist that contains, almost as a genre, the repeated theme of a people insurgent against its rulers, though the revolts are not directed against the monarch himself, the original beneficiary of the primal pact, but against his governors and other local powers. There are at least ninety-four plays whose plotting incorporates this kind of insurrection.

The other colonial Majesty, the Catholic Church, has oscillated between the commitment to a closed and intolerant hierarchical society and a populist collectivism, directed toward relieving a society oppressed by poverty, inequality, and injustice. This second tendency, embodied most remarkably in Father Bartolomé de las Casas, the original protector of the Indians, was passed on to university-educated elites of the twentieth century, transferred from the redemptive fathers to the modern civic and revolutionary redeemers.

Latin American Marxists, both theorists and men of action, found fertile soil in this old idea of the sovereign people in insurrection. Our countries in the twentieth century sometimes seemed to be a fresh stage for the dramas of the Spanish Golden Age, with its peoples (legitimately) in revolt against the “evil government” (
mal gobierno
) of military dictators, frequently supported by Washington. (These military governments, it should be stressed, were criminal seizures of power and generally replete with authoritarian outrages while at their very worst—in Argentina, Chile, and elsewhere—they were regimes of mass murder.) But once the process of overthrowing a tyrant has been completed, the redeemers have too often (as happened in Nicaragua) given power to a modern version of the absolute monarch, individual or collective, rather than instituting a liberal democracy with a social or even socialist direction.

 

NOT ALL
the redeemers treated in this book have felt a nostalgia for the ancient order. The monarchical tradition is completely alien, for instance, to the ideas of José Martí. Only at a tangent was his life and work touched by the cultural universe of Catholicism. But without considering the underlying Catholic culture within which he lived and died, one cannot understand the impact of his martyrdom nor the myth that has survived his short life. And it may be an exaggeration to find elements of a new Catholicism in the writings of Rodó, but it is nevertheless certain that he was so read and interpreted both in his own lifetime and later.

In Vasconcelos, the ancient inspiration is abundantly clear. His emphasis on education was explicitly inspired by the redemptive labors of the sixteenth-century missionaries. The indigenist Marxism of Mariátegui (which he himself described as a new “religion”) cannot be understood without considering Latin American Catholic culture; nor the connection of Eva Perón, in life and death, with her “shirtless” loyalists intent on the righting of wrongs; nor the Christlike impact (and postmortem sanctification) of Che Guevara; nor the original Marxism of Octavio Paz and his subsequent conversion away from these ideas, assumed with the guilt of the convert and the passion of a Crusader. Liberation theology was of course for Bishop Samuel Ruiz a natural development of this tradition and even in the histrionic Subcomandante Marcos (pupil of the Jesuits, Marxist, storyteller, and guerrilla) the aspiration is discernible toward an earlier order, an archaic indigenous utopia.

Little trace of Catholic schemata appears in the work of our two greatest novelists, but in both there is a crucial confrontation with the First Majesty, the all-powerful monarch who is “of the same substance” (in the words of the neo-scholastics) as his people, a figure of power toward which García Márquez, in both his literary and personal life, has directed his veneration and Vargas Llosa has criticized and condemned.

Hugo Chávez is something other, a person with no nostalgia at all. He is a postmodern mélange of redemptive ideologies, theories of heroism and Caribbean authoritarianism, without a trace of liberal or democratic conviction. His dream is of a monarchy erected on the base of “21st-century socialism,” a new and definitive consubstantiation of the
caudillo
and his people, which he sees as having been already achieved only by Fidel Castro. Chávez envisions himself as a continental redeemer and has come perilously close to the claim of being not only the earthly representative of a divinized Bolívar but his reincarnation.

It is a strange aspiration and opposed to the nature of Bolívar himself (despite his authoritarian tendencies), who rejected the monarchical past, refused to be crowned emperor, was opposed to social revolution, and feared that the centrifugal tendencies of the new federalist republics would nourish
caudillos,
popular insurrections, and even anarchy. He favored a government that would be “paternal” and centralized but within a strong republican context, in a sense the Thomist paradigm limited and controlled by laws.

 

SINCE
1989, for the first time in our history, all the countries of Latin America, with the single exception of Cuba, have adopted the procedures of electoral democracy. Many now show a marked dedication to competitive economic growth along with programs that further social justice. Such governments, when truly committed to democracy, are in line with Octavio Paz's final position: “a reconciliation of the two great political traditions of liberalism and socialism . . . the theme of our time.” The phrase reflects the present-day consensus in Latin America. And in general, the region seems to have freed itself of our two most endemic evils, militarism and the cult of the
caudillo.
But the influence of the ancient order has not died. The temptation of political absolutism and ideological orthodoxy, emanating above all from contemporary Cuba and Venezuela, is still alive and dangerous.

As long as there are nations immersed in poverty and inequality, redeemers will appear and seek to lead and liberate those peoples. Some of them will propose extreme solutions. But the process of democracy—often fragmentary and gradualist and perhaps less exciting than other alternatives—has shown more success in confronting such problems. And whatever solutions are proposed and instituted, the people of a country must have the absolute right to affirm or reject programs and leaders in the privacy of the voting booth, within the simple but profoundly moving atmosphere of honestly conducted elections.